Immigration or Migration?

By now you're all probably thinking, 'Okay, Strother. Put the Eco books down.' Not yet.

I found this particular passage in the essay 'Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable' from Five Moral Pieces especially interesting:

”Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people? I think it is possible: as I have said, immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be. As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable.”

On this note, is America more accurately experiencing migration — rather than immigration — of Latin Americans to U.S. soil? While it remains to be seen if our immigration ‘problem’ can be controlled politically, it seems to me that uncontrollable “natural phenomena” as noted by Eco exists in our scenario thanks to our shared border with Mexico. Further, it seems that Hispanics are, as a whole, doing a pretty impressive job of “mix(ing) with the natives.”